Forty Percent
by Tozette
Summary: Peace does not work out well for Tenten. She decides to forge a new life very far away, but to start with she's gonna need some help... Crack. Kakuzu/Tenten. Raised the rating for violence and swearing.
1. Chapter 1

For **thriceandonce** over on tumblr. : )

* * *

Tenten made a habit of showing up when Sasuke was away. It was probably telling that Sakura never asked her why she seemed to go out of her way to avoid Sasuke. Neither of them particularly wanted to argue about that.

(Still, Tenten maintained he was a dick.

He was a dick, and he would remain a dick until he died, preferably from something lingering.)

"Thank you for doing this," Sakura said, shoving away the things left out on - oh, every surface of her house, basically. Having a child certainly did not make the place neat.

"It's not a hardship," she informed Sakura cheerfully, bouncing Sarada on one knee while Sakura made an effort to get the house reasonably clean.

"You say that now," Sakura muttered, shoving her hair into a high knot on her head, "wait until you have kids."

"I don't think that's very likely, so I'll have to take your word on it. Won't I?" she added to the small child in her lap. "Won't I?"

The girl had dark, serious eyes. She took after Sasuke a lot, Tenten mused. She'd probably be a knockout when she was older... on several levels, considering her parents.

Right now, though, she was watching Tenten as though her attention was a tremendous, important thing.

Sakura snorted softly. "Give it time," she said with a lofty, knowing tone. Tenten resisted the urge to point out that she was a full year older than Sakura.

Tenten rolled her eyes while Sakura's back was turned.

"Is that a new tattoo?" she asked when she swept through the room again, searching for something amidst the discarded toys on the floor.

"Seal," Tenten nodded. She glanced down at her arm, even though she'd done the ink herself and she knew precisely what was there. There were so many of them now that she was unsurprised Sakura had taken a while to notice.

Her skin, once soft and girlish and unblemished, told a hell of a story. Scars on her hands, from where improperly handled weapons nicked her; scars on her arms, from where she deflected a sword or kunai aiming for something much more vital; scars on her ribs, on her belly - one notable one that went long and deep across her back - where she hadn't been quite fast enough.

On top of those, seals stood out, liquid-black in her tanned skin. She doubted she'd ever write with the grace of the Yondaime, but hers were workmanlike and practical.

Sakura shook her head. "You're better-armed now than you were during the war. What on earth are you going to do with them?"

Tenten glanced at her right hand, where the trailing strokes of a line of calligraphy came all the way to her knuckles. Idly, she bounced Sarada.

"Saa... who knows?" she said contemplatively. It was a lie. She knew exactly what she was going to do with them. She was just in the final stages of convincing herself it wasn't insane.

It was insane.

She'd officially spent too much time with Lee and Gai-sensei. The disease had reached her brain and now she had to leave for her own peace of mind.

Or maybe not. Lee and Gai-sensei had both taken to peace.

It was just Tenten who hadn't adjusted, really.

She wasn't made for peace. Her late parents were soldiers, her teacher was a shinobi, she'd lived through war and strife and - and she had no idea how anybody else could settle into peacetime.

She thought of Sakura, all smiles and tired contentment, muscles softened by the fleshy curves of motherhood. It was with guilty contempt that Tenten looked upon her and saw only wasted potential. She'd been _so fierce._

With a hard swallow, Tentan smiled at Sakura anyway. She had a good face for lying. Not ugly but not memorable, with no strong features.

Sakura looked right back at her and sighed. "Have you considered making seals for use in something we actually need?"

Tenten's smile became a little brittle. "Like what?" she wondered.

"Preservation? Storage? Healing, there's always diseases -" She shrugged. "The psych department in Intel could use some help with post-traumatic stress patients," she added thoughtfully.

"Hmm," said Tenten, without much commitment to the idea. Post-traumatic stress was a real problem in ninja after the terrors of the war. Other ninja, anyway - other people woke at night, panicky and shaking with bile in their throats, unable to tell dream from reality.

Tenten liked to think she dreamed what they dreamed: battlefield visions, exhausted muscles, aching wounds, ragdoll bodies with bright smiles slashed across their throats, that final surge of adrenalin just when she thought her body couldn't give anymore - the charnel-house reek of something dead left out to bloat in the sun.

She, too, woke up in a sweat with her heart pounding - but with a rush of fiery disappointment that coiled low and resentful in her body.

"Maybe there's something I could look into there." She didn't really intend to have time for it, though.

"Anyway, shouldn't you be working now?" Sakura asked, attacking her house with a feather duster and extreme prejudice.

Tenten shrugged. "Not much call for weapons during peace time," she pointed out a little bitterly. "I'm thinking of taking a couple of shifts at the hospital, actually."

Sakura's eyebrows rose. "Really? Well - I may have retired, but if you need help -"

"Yes, actually," Tenten interrupted with what was probably unseemly cheer. "I was having some trouble with the theory behind chakra-starting somebody's heart?"

"Wow, that's advanced. You're pretty far in your lessons, then?" Sakura grinned. Tenten agreed with her, and it didn't take a lot of effort to persuade her to abandon her dutiful cleaning and come sit down to discuss cardiovascular chakra manipulation theory.

Tenten smiled.

* * *

Performing a heart transplant on a bunny rabbit turned out to be both gross and unsuccessful the first four times she attempted it.

Her fifth bunny did not look upon her with much confidence, but he survived her treatment. She wiped a fleck of blood from her face - smeared, actually, is probably a more accurate descriptor - and smiled down at the twitching little thing.

The rabbit was still alive after a week, so Tenten let him go.

Then she got to work.

There were prisoners on death row in Konoha. These were mostly violent criminals with low probability of rehabilitation. There were even a few shinobi who, like herself, had not adapted well to living at peace.

Impeccable internal record keeping and jounin-level clearance led Tenten to Kouta Satoshi's execution. After a brief "mix up" with an older body, Tenten had a heart that was still sluggishly thumping in her hot little hand, and she was well on her way to the special preservations department of the morgue.

* * *

Translocation jutsu were not Tenten's speciality, and a wave of nausea hit her when she brought the body to a derelict bunker. It had already been converted for surgery - of a kind. Orochimaru had kept some of his specimens here. The place was made of metal and ceramic, easily-wiped surfaces. By and large the place was stained, grimy, and filled with the unwelcome sounds of something dripping somewhere. The air smelled of old meat.

Superstition or good sense kept the place off the patrol routes.

Kakuzu's records said he was a dangerous ninjutsu fighter, but he was built like a taijutsu-specialist: tall, with broad shoulders and long limbs that had plenty of reach. The seals used by the preservations department had kept his body as it was received, and most of it was muscle. The skin she could see - which was basically everything not covered by his ragged pants - was dark and covered with lines of heavily-stitched scars.

The inside of Kakuzu, when she broke open Tsunade's stitching, was still fleshy and strangely pink. Throughout all of his tissues were the twisted threads of his jiongu, a kinjutsu that still hummed faintly with surprising chakra residue. They were even through his bones. Tenten had no idea how he had survived the initial transformation.

Tenten was no healer, but happily Kakuzu was significantly hardier than the average bunny rabbit - once she'd shoved the still-slick heart of the executed shinobi between his ribs and applied the seal, it was astonishing how quickly his body responded. Lungs expanded. Muscles contracted. She felt it through her seal when his chakra system came to, sluggish but responsive.

Tenten paced silently, fingers twitching with the urge to just - burn out her seal. This was _insane. She_ was insane.

She could still stop, she thought, eyeing the body laid out on the table. Burning out her seal would destroy the heart. There'd be little in the way of residue, and the chances were good she could get the body back into the morgue without anybody the wiser.

Kakuzu's long fingers twitched in a motion ominously reminiscent of talons. He made a soft, groggy noise.

Chakra flared, and Tenten felt it when the natural activity of his body began to make his new heart beat on its own. She took a deep breath.

If she was going to do this, she couldn't hesitate. He was dangerous. _Really_ dangerous.

"Kakuzu-san," her voice came out flat and hard and confident.

The man on the table jerked. His eyes opened. They were weird eyes, bright green and hideously bloodshot, and she wasn't sure they'd improve over time. Oh, well. She didn't want him for his looks.

He took a huge shuddering breath and sat up - or, well, he tried to. What he actually did was kind of tremble, jerk and flop back to the table. He stared at nothing, blank-faced and unmoving for a second. Then, "Where am I?"

His voice had approximately the sound of a body dragged over gravel, and his pronounciation was slurred. Hmm. Unable to move, unsure where he was - all to Tenten's advantage, of course, but she wanted him on side.

She sighed. "Fire Country, where you died," she said after a considering pause, and received no response at all. "It turns out being dead wasn't very good for your body, so it will take some time to recover - if I don't kill you again before then," she added.

He grunted. "You must be an idiot, with all this unnecessary drama," he growled. "What do you want to know?"

The reports had mentioned his skills and habits in exhaustive detail, Tenten thought, but not his delightful social skills.

"Actually I didn't resurrect you for information," she said cheerfully.

Then she paused, trying to figure out how to phrase what she required of him without it sounding insane. Which was hard, obviously, because it was kind of insane.

"What?" he finally snapped at her.

"It's, uh, kind of a business proposal," she said finally.

Impatiently: "Get on with it."

"Fine. Come with me to Hills Country, show me how to get in on the bounty hunting thing, and then you can go and do whatever you like." Hopefully not attack Konoha, but she was pretty confident in Naruto's ability to deal with him if he did.

There was a long pause. "Hills country is on another continent across the other side of the world. You said we were in Fire Country?"

"We're at peace here," Tenten said, a little bitterly.

"Ah," he said in a tone of sudden understanding. "And what's in this for me?"

"You get to live, I smuggle you out of Fire Country -"

"So we're in Konoha," he interrupted.

Hmm, clever, too. The reports had overstated his ferocity and understated his intellect. Interesting. Tenten shrugged. "Of course. Where else?"

"I've lived a long time," he said, ignoring her question. He closed his eyes. Flatly he continued: "I'd rather stay dead."

Tenten wondered if that was true, but she rather doubted it. She continued blithely, because one thing the reports _were_ clear on: "Well, I was going to say fifteen per cent of my share of any bounties I take during the first year, but-"

His eyes snapped open again. "Seventy," he snarled.

Tenten laughed. It was a strange sound for so grim a place, and even she was surprised by the fierce delight of it.

"Seventy is ridiculous, and you won't be getting out of the village like that," she sniffed.

He made a second, struggling attempt to sit up. Tenten could feel the strain in the seal over his heart, throbbing gently in time with the chakra she was feeding it. "Be careful," she cautioned, earning an acidic look.

Kakuzu made it halfway and then levered himself up with trembling arms, which meant that Tenten's approximation of how long he'd take to recover was off by almost half. He recovered fast. She quickly recalculated. She still had time.

His chest heaved with the effort of sitting, but his eyes finally focused on her.

For a second Tenten contemplated what he saw - a slight woman, average height, in a qipao-style tunic and black shorts. Not very threatening, she supposed, but then his eyes were tracking her tattoos. Maybe he saw something different.

"You're not in any bingo book," he said with flat certainty.

"I wasn't, when you died," she agreed. By the end of the war she had been, but by the end of the war everybody was so tired it didn't really matter. And now... peace. None of the major hidden villages would even try to collect her.

It wasn't that she _wanted_ people trying to kill her - it wasn't a fun experience, all up, but...

"Sixty," he ground out.

"Twenty five," she said with a sniff.

There was a long, icy pause.

"Forty," she sighed.

"Forty," he agreed. He did not smile, but somehow his voice gave the impression of a grudging pleasure.

"The Akatsuki could take you at your word," she said, smiling enough for both of them. Tenten wasn't afraid to hide behind good cheer. "Can I?"

He made a disgusted noise, which Tenten figured was the best she was going to get. After a cautious second, they shook on it.

* * *

It's the beginning of something beautiful. (And also cracky.)


	2. Chapter 2

"Why are we doing this again?" Tenten muttered, leaning on her shovel and watching in fascinated disgust as Kakuzu painstakingly sewed a severed hand back onto the body to which it belonged.

"Shut up," said Kakuzu, with what passed for pleasantness for him.

"So does that mean it's because you're friends?" she said, without missing a beat.

"I will kill you," he told her conversationally. "I doubt anyone would miss you."

"You will. My seal's still keeping your heart beating," she lied. "And it will be for some time."

He grunted sourly. He still had not indicated whether or not he knew she was lying, but then a good shinobi wouldn't either way. Tricky bastard. Tenten smiled. She was already happier than she would have been selling weapons in the midday sun.

Kakuzu's breath caught as he leaned down to the hole again, and Tenten pushed away from her shovel. "I've got it."

He made an annoyed noise, but let her lean down into the pit and pluck Hidan's head from the earth like some kind of grizzly harvest. His face was slack with sleep or unconsciousness, but his body did not appear to have decayed in the slightest - in fact, there was still an alarmingly healthy-looking pinkness to his complexion. "Huh," said Tenten.

Kakuzu gestured impatiently for the head, and then the pair of them stood and watched while his threads, sluggish but obedient, went to work sewing the stump of his neck to the rest of his body.

Hidan's skin was whiter than white, and looked somehow even paler next to Kakuzu's. Tenten stared at it for half a second, which was long enough for Kakuzu to lose patience.

"Hurry up."

Really, between Neji and Lee and Gai-sensei, Tenten's temper was kind of hard to rouse - which was lucky, because Kakuzu had turned being rude into an art form.

"Sure," she agreed easily, and bent to heft Hidan over her shoulder. He wasn't as heavy as she'd been expecting - Lee was heavier.

As they left Konoha quietly and without much notice, it was Neji upon whom her mind lingered. She wondered what he'd think of her decision.

Probably nothing good.

Maybe, she thought, if you'd been around to stop me —

No. Nothing good would come of that sort of thinking.

* * *

Travelling with Kakuzu was… quiet. Especially after spending most of her career travelling with Lee, Gai-sensei or both at the same time.

Tenten found the silence strangely grating. She wasn't an exceptionally chatty person, but Kakuzu's silence was this oppressive, encompassing thing. He radiated a field of 'shut up, shut up, shut up,' the same way some ninja radiated killing intent.

Tenten lasted three hours on the road before she had to break it. "This guy's immortal, right?" she said, shifting her shoulders uncomfortably. Hidan was slumped across them, dirty limbs a dead weight pressing her down. Tenten mostly just sucked it up and tried to distribute his weight evenly.

Kakuzu grunted.

She took that as an affirmative. "How?"

There was a pause so long Tenten thought that they'd gone back to repressive silence.

"He's a lab rat. Although he says it's his god."

Weird. Tenten eyed the pale hair she could see over one shoulder. "His god," she echoed dubiously.

Kakuzu made an equally unimpressed noise.

As Kakuzu's motor function recovered, their pace picked up. They camped outside instead of taking the inns on trade routes, which was probably sensible for a Konoha missing nin in Fire Country.

A missing nin, some genin small fry who seemed to be making a living off killing the remaining bandits in the highlands, kindly donated a second heart to Kakuzu. Tenten watched, fascinated, as the dark threads spilled out from Kakuzu and cradled the still-steaming organ gently. It still throbbed when he pulled it into his body.

Maybe all forms of immortality were really weird, actually.

Having a second heart seemed to relax Kakuzu a little, and they went from steadily walking to putting space between themselves and Konoha at a ground-eating jog. Tenten was sure that her disappearance had been noted by now, but whether or not anybody actually thought she'd fled the village as a missing-nin was still up for debate. Hers was a quiet and bloodless exit, all told, and peace time made security lax.

Still, they left Fire Country quickly and made good time through the largely demilitarised Hot Water Country. A ship across the bay to Lightning might have been quicker, but there was less chance of being noticed and remembered if they went overland.

Frost Country was an unmitigated misery in early spring. It was cold enough in the pass they used to make Tenten's lips and hands raw, and she thought her toes might never thaw.

Hidan remained dead or unconscious throughout.

"So when's he gonna wake up?" Tenten wondered, prodding Hidan's slumped body. She'd been pretty dubious on the 'immortal' thing, but he'd actually begun breathing noticeably over the past few days, and occasionally his eyes moved beneath his eyelids.

Kakuzu's hard eyes flicked in her direction, but they mostly landed on Hidan. "When he wakes up," he said after a cranky pause, "you'll be wishing he was unconscious again."

Tenten took a dubious view of that statement because if he was truly that awful, would Kakuzu have rescued him in the first place? "If you say so," she said neutrally.

* * *

Kakuzu was _indisputably _correct.

Hidan woke on a foul morning in the highlands of Lightning Country, and the first thing he did was kick Tenten in the ribs.

It was not an auspicious beginning.

He was some kind of mouth-frothing, psychopathic ball of grave dirt and spitting and swearing and, like, _rage._

Hidan raged, and kicked her, and Tenten immediately unslung him from her shoulders and dropped him on his arse.

"What the hell," he snapped, "that hurt!"

Tenten eyed him, rubbing her side, which was quickly developing a bruise in the shape of his bare foot. She tried to figure out how he'd found the leverage to kick her like that. "Sorry," she said, rather perfunctorily.

He gave her an assessing look during which he didn't make the slightest effort to get back to his feet. Then he fell to examining his new stitches. He rubbed some dirt off his skin. He flexed his hands carefully.

Then his brow furrowed. "Where the hell are we?"

Most good ninja were very clever - they had to be to survive. Hidan, Tenten suspected, mostly survived because he couldn't actually be killed. Whether or not he _had_ a brain was secondary to how he used it, and cleverness was not a major component of his skill set.

"Lightning Country," said Kakuzu, from right behind him.

Hidan tilted his head back, baring the long naked line of his neck and a jumping pulse point, peering back at Kakuzu. "You came back," he said in a tone that was suspiciously neutral.

There was a long pause.

Hidan's lips curved in a narrow, inviting smile. "Ne, Kakuzu," he said, in a tone someone else might have reserved for some really filthy sexual innuendo, "you act tough, but you're really a nice guy, aren't you?"

"I can still cut you up and put you back in the dirt," growled Kakuzu.

Hidan's smile widened. Tenten thought it maybe also became more genuine. "Konoha-nin," he said, glancing thoughtfully at Tenten and then back to Kakuzu. "New heart?" he asked.

"Business acquaintance," said Kakuzu flatly and repressively. His eyes met Tenten's briefly. She shrugged, and then she was already a step ahead when he turned on his heel and started off again, leaving Hidan in the dirt.

"Bu— Oi, what the hell, Kakuzu?"

Hidan scrambled to catch up. He was missing a lot of recent history. The war and the downfall of the Akatsuki didn't seem to bother him in the slightest, although he needed the information for context.

Once Hidan was on his feet he recovered with a swiftness that was almost alarming. It took him a couple of hours before he was ripping out his stitches, and only minutes before the stiffness in his limbs seemed to evaporate.

A healthy Hidan, Tenten realised shortly, was an obnoxious Hidan.

He was… kind of a lot like Naruto, actually - if you took the combined drive for protecting his friends and eating ramen and channelled it into _murder _and_ bitching._

Happily, as soon as they stopped for the night, Hidan freaked out and raced away.

Tenten slumped against the wall of their cave and revelled in the silence for a few long moments. "Why the hell did you rescue this guy?" she muttered to Kakuzu.

He cut his gaze her way. It wasn't very friendly.

"Fine, fine," she sighed.

The following morning Hidan was there again, sleepily satisfied and covered in blood. He washed it off in an icy river and then spent the next three hours complaining bitterly of the cold.

"Seriously," Tenten muttered to Kakuzu. "Why?"

Kakuzu glanced at Hidan as though he was contemplating the answer to that query himself.

Tenten had never even heard the word 'Jashin' before flipping through Hidan's files in the Konoha archives, but by the time they made it all the way across Lightning she felt as though her knowledge was probably equivalent to the average priest's.

That, and she'd seen Hidan stab himself in the guts so many times she'd lost whatever squeamishness she'd had left.

"Seriously," said Hidan eventually, "where the hell are we going?"

Tenten blinked, once, slowly, and glanced at him. "Hills country," she said. "Didn't you know that?"

"Oh," said Hidan, fixing his strange, pale eyes on her. "So you do talk." Then his brain caught up with his mouth. "Wait, Hills? That's ages away! What the hell?"

"Peace time has left us with very few good bounties," Tenten said, ignoring his first comment in favour of the second, "but there's still plenty of civil war in Hills Country."

"Money," spat Hidan. He turned an aggressive stare on Kakuzu. "Kakuzu, you—"

"Yes," hissed Kakuzu, whirling on him in a surprising display of temper. Instead of flinching, Hidan bared his teeth in a smile , "money."

Hidan scrubbed his hands through his hair. "That's a sin, you know."

"What do you care?" Tenten asked, propping her hands on her hips. "War and bounties means plenty of people to kill," she pointed out.

Hidan eyed her. "That's true, making good sacrifices to Jashin-sama is basically all I care about," he agreed after a second.

Then he stretched and cracked his knuckles. "Well, life happens that way sometimes," he said prosaically.


	3. Chapter 3

A quick update.

* * *

Getting a ship wasn't actually that much of a disaster, although Kakuzu's frankly neurotic need to haggle to the last penny made Tenten want to strangle him.

The ship they ended up on was worn but very well-loved, cared for by its sailors the way a shinobi cared for her weapons - like something you were trusting your life to. Given its light crew and shallow, sleek design, it definitely wasn't a trader's ship.

It was made for speed, shallow waters and narrow, secretive berths. Tenten eyed the crew with a dubious gaze.

"Pirates," she muttered, watching them heave supplies aboard as they prepared to weigh anchor.

"Almost as bad as missing nin," sneered one of them, having overheard her.

Well, that was true, but it wasn't so much the criminality she objected to - it was the _smell_.

At any rate, being surrounded by filthy pirates with lingering eyes and dried blood under their nails wasn't really the problem in the end. The disaster turned out to be that Tenten got seasick.

Kakuzu barely seemed to notice - although she was sure he did, because he was very adept at noticing things - and Hidan thought it was _hilarious_.

"Are you fucking serious?" he said the first time he saw her grimly clinging to the starboard railing, vomiting up her guts.

"She's been doing it for hours," one of the pirates confided with what was perilously close to a sneer.

Hidan started to laugh.

"Oh my god. Shut up," she croaked, sagging when her stomach had finally finished its violent rebellion. "Shut up, shut up, shut-"

Hidan's laughter drowned out her muttering, but it at least had the benefit of making the pirates shudder and inch away from the mad shrieking noise it became.

One of the pirates apparently had no sense of self-preservation at all, because he tried to join in with Hidan's laughing.

Hidan eyed him speculatively for a second, and Tenten felt the dim flicker of killing intent when he smiled widely. She tensed. If Hidan started murdering people now, when they were barely halfway in -

"Hidan," growled Kakuzu's low voice. "Not yet."

Tenten ignored the argument that ensued and focused on vomiting.

For the first time Tenten thought she might be missing Lee's overzealous solicitousness. But no, it turned out that feeling was mostly just nausea.

She contemplated jumping overboard and running on the water, but if Konoha _did_ send a tracking team after her, they'd probably be able to sniff out chakra - the Aburame trackers definitely could. Too risky.

"Mnngh," she said, staring morosely down into the rocking waves. "Are we there yet?"

They weren't.

It seemed like the trip was interminable. Between throwing up and hating everything, Tenten actually kind of lost track.

When they did finally get to dry land - a shallow, narrow cove that included precisely zero customs agents, Tenten thought cynically - Hidan slaughtered every last pirate on the ship, shrieking and laughing like some hungry vengeful demon.

Tenten sat in the sand, rubbing her unhappy belly, and waited with Kakuzu. "Should you really let him do that?" she wondered. "Doesn't it give you a bad reputation?"

Gai-sensei had taught them that, at least: being rude to civilians, no matter how annoying, gave Konoha-nin a bad reputation in the public eye.

Kakuzu's eyes flicked to her. "I don't make a habit of contracting the services of pirates," he said blandly. Then, after a pause, "additionally, if they're dead, we need not pay them."

Tenten snorted softly.

Of course.

Kakuzu's brutal but practical approach left them well-supplied once they'd raided the pirates' stores, and surprisingly wealthy once they'd taken all their money.

Hidan, of course, complained the whole way, despite being flat on his back with a pike jammed through his intestinal tract. He interrupted his mumbled prayers as soon as they began looking through the hold.

"What the fuck is wrong with you," he began, clutching his rosary the same way the daimyo's middle-aged wife might have clutched her pearls, quite as though their immorality was the most scandalous thing to which he'd borne witness in his life.

"You wanted to kill them all," Kakuzu reminded him.

"_Sacrifices to Jashin-sama_," Hidan corrected. "It's not on the same level as -" his lip curled, "as _petty theft_."

"Is it _really_ theft, though," Tenten wondered. "I mean they're all dead, aren't they-"

She was interrupted by the soft groan of a still-dying pirate.

Kakuzu picked his way through the scattered bodies like a heron navigating the shallows, and then there was a wet squelching noise. "Yes," he agreed after a second.

"So it's more like salvage," she said cheerfully.

"Sophistry," hissed Hidan.

Tenten rolled her eyes, and refrained from telling him that sophistry was the cornerstone of all unshakable faith. She'd had enough philosophical arguments to last her a lifetime while Neji was around. (She... missed him, she thought, with a kind of unguarded pang deep below her ribs that time couldn't touch. But some things you had to grit your teeth and get over, and the deaths of friends were among them.)

While Hidan was recovering from his bloody exertions, she and Kakuzu got down to the business of sorting through the goods they'd found.

There were several pots of ink, all sealed with wax, but none of them were of a quality Tenten would use for seals. That was a pity, but she would hardly compromise her work with sub-standard ingredients. The pirates had airtight water stores and dried foods, which were added to their own stores.

Tenten took her share and sealed it into a scroll with a few short, workmanlike strokes of a brush. Kakuzu's eyes were sharp while he watched her complete the sealing.

They slept in the shelter of the cove that night, warding off the chill with the heat of the burning pirate ship. When dawn crept over the horizon, they were back on the road.

If nothing else, Kakuzu's sense of direction was unerringly accurate. He glanced at the fading stars, blinked his uncanny eyes at the horizon, and picked their direction without delay or uncertainty. It took Tenten herself another ten minutes to be absolutely certain they were going the right way. Hidan, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn't seem to care.

"It's a big city," Tenten muttered as they stopped outside Hato no Machi, which was the biggest town in Bird country if her memory held correct. "Anybody who recognises any of us... the news will travel fast."

"Who cares?" Hidan wondered, no doubt itching from his stint with no sacrifices on the road.

"_I_ care," Tenten said shortly. Her temper was wearing thin. How had she ever thought that Hidan was only as annoying as Naruto? Now that comparison seemed positively benign.

"Shut up," said Kakuzu in his flat, dry voice, cutting through the burgeoning argument.

Then without pause or explanation, he started toward the city that rose on the horizon.

Hidan scowled after him. "Fucking bastard, who the hell said you could make all the decisions?"

But Tenten noticed that he hastened to catch up.

Tenten took the time to cover her seals and hitai-ate with a transformation technique, which would at least prevent any casual observer from noticing her, and then broke into a jog so she wasn't left behind.

* * *

There were rules to being a missing-nin. Or, well, maybe not _rules_. Courtesies. It was a strange thought, because Tenten had - as most of the ninja she knew - assumed that once a ninja became a missing-nin, they were basically thrown into a world of absolute anarchy.

That was... less true than one might think. It wasn't so much that they governed themselves as they had... you know, _systems_. Social conventions. _Etiquette._

Tenten hadn't exactly learned this stuff in Konoha.

They ended up in a quaint little tea shop with a big sign out the front that said 'Tea and Sweets'.

The tea was watered down and the sweets looked like they'd been made months prior, and Tenten eyed Kakuzu when he stalked in ahead of them because surely his cheapskatery didn't extend to this, this was foul.

The man behind the counter certainly didn't seem to be expecting anybody who might actually order, that was for sure. He barely even looked up when Kakuzu, Tenten and Hidan strolled past him, which -

\- well, they weren't the _least_ noticeable bunch, were they?

But five minutes later they were out the back of the store with the proprietor's - mother, Tenten thought, from her resemblance to the man out the front of the store. She served them the watered down tea, which was at least warm and in clean cups, and continued the steady _click-click_ of her knitting while they perused the lists of yellowing paper that she had produced.

"This," Kakuzu grunted, getting Tenten's attention, "is the reward."

She followed his long finger to an entry on the paper. "Okay," she said slowly. B-rank bounty, or thereabouts. Hmm. "And..."

He pointed to a tiny symbol, a little like a plus sign. "Alive."

"Right," she agreed, peering closely. "Akito Serahara," she murmured, squinting at the tiny writing. "From Suna," she said, a little surprised.

Well, it stood to reason. They'd had a rough time between wars, hadn't they?

"You want to do a hunt here?" she asked, shifting uncomfortably. True, they were no longer anywhere near her home country, but... they were barely half way to Hills, and...

"Last sighted," said Kakuzu, jamming his finger against the old paper.

"...In Marsh Country," she read thoughtfully. It was... closer to Hills. A detour. If they kicked up enough of a fuss it would definitely lay a false trail - anybody would think they were hidden for Key, not Hills.

"I'll take point on this one," said Kakuzu, raising his angry green eyes to hers. They were bright and poisonous, like snakeskin. "The next one's yours. After that, you're on your own, barring my forty per cent. Don't," he added in a growl, "think I won't know."

Tenten rolled her eyes. "You're so suspicious," she said, even as she was listening to the steady _clack-clack_ of baa-san's knitting needles and thinking they were too heavy to be standard. The woman's eyes met hers when she flicked her gaze that way. Her aged lips curled.

Hmm.

"Are we gonna find this guy or what?" Hidan interrupted, sounding like he was so bored he was about to expire on the spot.

"Yes," grunted Kakuzu.

Tenten felt her nervous system give a tiny shiver of excitement at the prospect.

"Yep," she agreed.

* * *

Hey, look, _something_ got written this weekend.


	4. Chapter 4

It was immediately apparent to Tenten that anyone who tracked them as far as Marsh Country would indeed assume it was the only route to their destination. A person would have to be _insane_ to go there on purpose otherwise.

(At no point did either of her companions disprove this hypothesis.)

At the border the landscape dropped off steadily until the solid ground and tall trees turned into uncertain footing and misleading patches of herbacious plants and sickly little shrubs. There was a viscousness to the damp air and a battalion of mosquitoes.

"This is stupid," Hidan reminded them on the morning of their second day.

The gasses rising from the wetlands made a luminous, low-visibility fog and everything was heavy with a thickness and moisture that tasted strangely sulfurous.

Tenten kind of agreed with Hidan, which made her genuinely worried for her own mental state.

"Shut up," said Kakuzu, who was beginning to sound like a broken record.

Hidan slapped at a mosquito. "Seriously, there's no bounty on the fucking planet that's -"

Kakuzu turned and lunged, Hidan dodged - and he landed on a patch f ground that was less solid than it seemed. He slipped and didn't dodge the follow-up strike, which planted him face-first in the stagnant water.

Tenten winced, even as she took a second to enjoy the reprieve from Hidan's relentless bitching.

Kakuzu shot her a foul look for good measure and turned on his heel to stalk away while Hidan was still choking on the swamp water. Tenten hesitate, then growled out a sigh and pulled him up from the stagnant mess.

He must have inhaled when he went down, because Hidan immediately coughed up an impressive stream of greenish-brown water on her shoes. His face was red with that exertion, and whatever was at the bottom of the marsh was stuck in his hair and drooling slimily down his neck. He made a noise something along the lines of "Urghk."

Tenten was kind of glad her shoes were already ruined so she had no way of knowing which fluids had come from Hidan's oesophagus. "We'll get it done as quickly as possible and get the hell out of here," she said in what she hoped was a soothing voice.

Hidan gave her an unimpressed stare through his teary red eyes, then spat out another mouthful of foul water, wrung out his hair and stormed off bellowing: "Wait, you dick-"

Tenten sighed and took off after both of them. This was her reward for trying to be friendly to the psycho, she supposed. She smacked at another mosquito and snarled silently. The combination of Hidan and this marsh was doing nothing good for her temper.

Despite the aggravations, she was learning from Kakuzu. He was a mean piece of work, but he stuck to his word about teaching her and he was good at what he did.

The trip to the Marsh turned out to be quite educational.

"He's a Sand ninja," he was saying in his deep, faintly sneering voice. There was a distinct sense of superiority in his tone that just never really seemed to dissipate. "So he has some skills specific to that lot."

He glanced at her.

Tenten kept most of her attention on the shadowy, luminous fog. It was hell on visibility. "So... he's probably a wind user, good with poisons, very likely to have no medic training... and he almost certainly knows that clean-water-finding technique."

Kakuzu nodded. "And the swamp's driving him mad," he added.

Well, yes, but that hardly took any analytical skill to determine. The swamp was driving them _all_ mad.

Tenten toed her next patch of ground, discovered that it was not in fact ground, and used chakra-lined feet to pick her way across. Some distance to her right, a thick bubble went _plop_ as it popped, and the luminescence of the fog changed intensity, brightening briefly.

Ugh, this place was so gross.

"What else?" he prompted impatiently.

"Uhh," Tenten thought. "He's a B-rank bounty, so he's either not a combat specialist or he's, like, low chuunin rank at best. And he's from the desert, but we're trying to find him by probability and chakra signatures..." she frowned. It wasn't easy to track a man in a marsh, obviously, but for somebody supposedly so unfamiliar with the terrain... "He has to be pretty sneaky not to leave tracks?"

"Yes, and no," Kakuzu drawled. "He could have rapidly adjusted to the terrain," he allowed, "or he could be good at hiding his tracks, or," he turned, levelling his gaze at Tenten and Hidan. His eyes were very green and deeply eerie in the dispersed light of the fog. "He _is_ leaving tracks. They're just not the kind we'd know to follow."

Tenten blinked. Then she thought about that for a second.

Oh.

Oh, of _course_.

She dove, hard and fast and hit the water in a roll that never broke its surface. The impact made her breath come harder, but she'd _felt_ the swipe of Hidan's hand moving the heavy air. If she'd moved a hair's breadth less, or less quickly - well.

She didn't know much about Hidan, but she had seen his forehead protector - he'd been buried with it. And it was from the Village Hidden in Hot Water - a place where strange gasses in the earth heated and drove mineral-rich water to the surface, leaving it humid, damp, and littered with springs.

It wasn't a swamp, but the likelihood of Hidan slipping like that -

Nah.

"Still not used to the wetlands," Kakuzu said, while Tenten shifted her hand to the seal tattooed upon her forearm, crouched and ready. "Although that idiot _is_ easy to impersonate."

Hidan's face melted away with a flicker of genjutsu - not a henge, something quite different. A specialised infiltration technique? - revealing a very different one. This one ad the common medium-tanned skin and pale hair of a Wind Country native, a crooked nose and wide, sharp cheekbones.

Serahara smiled grimly. "Bounty hunters," he sighed. He looked between them with calculating eyes. "Well. I _am_ sorry about your friend. ...but no hard feelings, right?"

And then he stepped back into the foggy marsh, some kind of illusion already breaking up his silhouette with alarming swiftness. Tenten channelled chakra to her legs, ready to leap before he could fade away like a ghost -

"I won't let you," said Kakuzu calmly.

A cruel black thread shot from the marsh beneath Serahara and snapped straight through his foot with a foul, wet noise like ripping stiff fabric. Their bounty hissed with pain and jerked his foot up, swearing - but the thread was wrapped around his ankle not a second later.

He hurled a kunai at the dark thread, but even as one snapped another replaced it - and then another, and another, and another, until he was trussed up in Kakuzu's dark threads.

"...no way," muttered Tenten, sweatdropping. That had been... look, Kakuzu was formidable, but this was _pathetic_. Which meant it was probably a lie. A feint or a trap. She flared her chakra, frowning, trying to determine if it was an illusion.

It didn't seem to be. Nothing wavered with the dip and flare of her energy. The blood on Serahara's foot seemed pretty real, too.

Cautiously, Tenten took some blood from the wound upon her finger. The smell and consistency were right.

"Did we actually catch him?" she asked incredulously.

"No," said Kakuzu, looking strange and monstrous with his dark threads writhing about him. "I caught him. You stayed out of the way and observed."

Okay, well - well, _all right_, that was true. Tenten shook her head, bemused and mystified. "So he's not a combat specialist." She scrunched up her nose. No _way_ was he a combat specialist. Tenten was a combat specialist, and she was pretty sure she'd have kicked him halfway across Marsh Country when she was a genin. "Infiltration?"

Kakuzu grunted. "At a guess," he agreed, eyeing their captive as he approached, carefully circling him. Serahara's eyes were wide, pupils dark pinpricks in the greenish-blue of his irises. "It would explain why they want him alive. Plenty of intel to get from an intel agent. I assume," he added with irony, "that the plan was to take Hidan's place, kill us - or more likely, given your skill level, to take somebody hostage as leverage to get away. The marsh covers your tracks and you get to pick us off one by one from within the fog."

He nodded thoughtfully. "If you weren't so incredibly outclassed, it may even have worked."

Serahara spat in his face.

Kakuzu seemed pretty unbothered by that for a moment. After a second, though, one of his threads coiled around the bounty's neck, up over his chin, and sewed his mouth shut in a bloodied slash. There was a fair amount of muffled yelling, and one awkward moment when Serahara tore a stitch with his thrashing.

There was a mix of blood and saliva dripping down his chin.

Tenten decided that she wasn't going to comment on that.

"Are you going to want those back? I can tie him," Tenten said, scrubbing one hand through her hair. It was too humid here, and the strands stuck to her neck.

Kakuzu agreed in the end, if only because they'd have to drag him back to civilisation to get their reward at some point - which meant showing other people the mobile threads that formed part of his forbidden technique. There was no point in showing that sort of thing off until necessary.

Tenten performed a brief but thorough pat-down of Serahara while Kakuzu held him still, relieving him of rations, a first aid kit, weapons, a battered bingo book and some loose change (which Kakuzu immediately appropriated). Then she unsealed a thick length of chain from one of her scrolls - made to replace the chains on several of her weapons as required - and got to it. It wasn't quite as flexible as rope, but it also couldn't be cut by any weapon she'd missed.

Kakuzu eyed her work warily, but in the end he didn't criticise, which for Kakuzu was as good as shouting his approval, really. He was such a sullen bastard.

"Okay," said Tenten, once she was done, "so where's Hidan, then?"

Their captive made a scoffing noise in his throat, despite his sewn mouth.

"Probably in the nearest village by now," Kakuzu predicted. "Entertaining himself, that idiot."

Tenten wrinkled her nose. Killing pirates and ninja was one thing, but she wasn't sure about the business of murdering civilians. Hidan, on the other hand, seemed _very sure_ about the business of murdering civilians.

She rubbed her forehead, wondered if this meant that Hidan would catch up or they'd have to find him - not hard, considering the bloody trail he'd probably leave in his wake - but she decided not to bother asking. She'd find out, and both she and Kakuzu could spend the interim relishing the silence.

Without the constant commentary of Hidan - or of the infiltrator pretending to be Hidan - their movement through the marsh was punctuated only by the shift of small animals in the grasses and the droning buzz of insects that rose as the day warmed. Tenten hadn't realised at all that she'd been using his voice to mark the time, but it was true that when they moved in relative silence there was a dreamlike, interminable quality about this part of Marsh Country: the terrain was changeable, the air was thick and hard to see through... Really, they could quite easily have been walking in circles.

She flared her chakra occasionally, just to make sure they _weren't_. Kakuzu must have noticed, but he didn't comment. They weren't trying to hide, anyway, not really.

"How likely are bounties to be asked for alive?" Tenten asked later in the day, sticky and warm and starting to feel like the whole movement through the marsh was some kind of hallucination with nothing to punctuate it.

Kakuzu must have been feeling at least a little bit of that, because he glanced back at her and didn't snarl at all. "Perhaps one in five. They pay better, but they're a hassle," he nodded at Serahara, who was dragging his feet under Tenten's watchful eye.

So it went: silence, insects and the faint sploosh of footsteps in the water, punctuated by questions Tenten asked when the oppressive feeling of the marsh was overwhelming. It was something of a relief to find themselves approaching a rise in the land. There was a village sticking out of one side of the incline, the downhill side hoisted at haphazard and varying heights from the damp waters on stilts.

It wasn't much of a village: a small population, full of fishers, rice farmers and weavers with few craftspeople and even fewer public buildings. A noticeable pall of fear hung over the place as they approached, however. Townspeople were scarce but frightened eyes peered out at them from behind curtains and slats. It was not a good feeling.

Tenten saw that one of the public buildings - one of two, including a tiny clinic for the local medicine woman - was a temple. The door had evidently been kicked off its hinges and Tenten sighed heavily.

Kakuzu glanced at her and frowned. "Wait here."

Tenten hesitated, but, really, she had no interest in finding out what it looked like inside the temple. Even from a distant vantage, she could _smell_ the slaughterhouse reek of it.

Instead she remained with Serahara, and hoped that Kakuzu could persuade Hidan to hurry the hell up.

* * *

If there was anything you particularly liked about this chapter, drop me a review and let me know.


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